The ChatGPT gender gap is closing
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Women are now using ChatGPT slightly more than men, according to an economic report OpenAI released Monday.
Why it matters: Closing the gender gap helps ensure women aren't left behind as AI reshapes work and life.
In the first few weeks after ChatGPT's release, OpenAI estimated that as many as 80% of users were male, according to the report.
- More recent data from June found slightly more usage among those with traditionally female names.
- OpenAI estimates its gender mix by analyzing user names as typically male, female or uncertain, which can indicate broad trends but isn't a scientifically accurate metric for assessing usage by gender.
- The key to gender balance has been expanding usage beyond early adopters, OpenAI chief economist Ronnie Chatterji told Axios. "There's been so much excitement about ChatGPT and how people can use it to do really practical things," he said.
By the numbers: OpenAI's economic report draws on a sampling of 1.5 million conversations from ChatGPT's roughly 700 million weekly users.
- 80% of usage fell into three categories: practical guidance, information search and writing help.
- Coding and other specialized uses were far less common.
- Using ChatGPT as a companion or virtual therapist accounted for less than 2% of usage, per the study.
The fine print: OpenAI studied a sampling of messages from logged-in users over 18, excluding those who specifically opted out, as well as those who requested their data not be used to train new models.
- The company relied on AI to categorize the content of messages, but researchers did not have access to individual chats.
